His prophesy of doom came when a member of the audience asked him: “Do you think the world will end naturally or will man destroy it first?”

“We face a number of threats to our survival from nuclear war, catastrophic global warming, and genetically engineered viruses,” the research director at Cambridge University’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics replied.

“The number is likely to increase in the future, with the development of new technologies, and new ways things can go wrong. Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or 10,000 years.

“By that time, we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race. However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period.”

Most of the threats the human race faces come from progress in science and technology, he said.

New Hawking black hole theory1:16

Stephen Hawking explains his new idea on how information avoids being lost in black holes. Courtesy KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm

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